Advertising

Red 5 Studios Using morpheme Animation Engine For Next-Gen MMO

NaturalMotion announced that Red 5 Studios has added morpheme to its game development pipeline. Chosen for its intuitive graphical user interface and ability to increase collaboration between animators and programmers, Red 5 Studios is using morpheme for an unannounced next-gen game title.

morpheme is robust middleware designed to give developers and animators unprecedented creative control over the look of their final in-game animation by allowing them to author and preview blends, blend trees and transition graphs in real time.

“We added morpheme to our pipeline because we wanted to give our animators more control over the final animations that would go into the game,” said Mark Kern, president and CEO of Red 5 Studios. “In a lot of other systems, after the animators export their work, they don't get to see how the animations interact until it is in the game. If they then need to tweak a transition between animations or states, they have to edit a text file and then run the game again, which usually tears at an animator's soul. morpheme has an intuitive graphical interface that allows animators to go in and setup all these transitions and preview them without involving much programmer intervention. It cuts down on the time that a programmer and animator need to work together to get a system working within the game, and let's the animator focus on what they were hired to do - animate.”

“The team behind Red 5 Studios has one of the most impressive track records in MMOs, be it commercial, creative or technical,” said Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion. “We are aware how important Red 5 Studio’s technology decisions are, and are proud they have chosen morpheme as their animation engine.”

morpheme consists of two components: morpheme:runtime and morpheme:connect. morpheme:runtime is a run-time engine optimized for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, and ships with full source code. morpheme:connect is a powerful 3D authoring application that allows animators to graphically author blend trees and transition logic (based on Hierarchical Finite State Machines), modify and edit parameters through sliders and view the results in real-time. morpheme is designed as a flexible and open system and does not require the licensing of any other product. Unlike euphoria, morpheme is not based on Dynamic Motion Synthesis. Instead, morpheme complements euphoria’s advanced real-time behaviors.